


What I Lost In You

by Barkour



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: F/M, Future Fic, Penetrative Sex, Speculation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-04
Updated: 2019-02-04
Packaged: 2019-10-22 08:02:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17659052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Barkour/pseuds/Barkour
Summary: Eat, drink, be merry. The eve of the war's end.





	What I Lost In You

**Author's Note:**

> [Title from "Like a River Runs" by Bleachers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWpWfL2RlgI).

And somehow after everything, as they each and their allies too readied for the god-splitting terror of this last war act, at the end of it all: Jester came to him. 

White phosphorus, black powder import, diamond dust and paper: he spilled it all into pack, pocket, these tools magic demanded to manifest. Frumpkin slunk through the shadows with eyes gleaming like fire caught in stones. The deal was nearly done. The fey licked at his heels. He was going mad; he had gone mad.

His name, from the stair: “Cay-leb,” and he did not pause in his work, but he hurt nonetheless, in whatever scrap of self remained in the meat of his body. He had failed, after all. They were dead, _mama und papa_. They would always be dead there in that field of ash. So many things he cut out of his spirit and flesh. Bren, bastard, _hurensohn_. 

It could not still hurt, to hear Jester call his name. It could not hurt to see her on the stair, her dark hair spilled ink around her jaw, the fine pink-green-scarlet-orange-white ash lines the Traveler had tattooed onto her face when he named her Champion. Furious he shoved a packet of black powder into the inmost sleeve of his vest.

He asked, “Are you ready?”

She toed quickly, lightly into the poor lit workshop room. The bells on her horns tinkled. The corked glass bottles of healing hooked in a long line down her bandolier, they swayed glimmering with strange and blessed liquids. 

“I have to talk to you, Caleb. Please. You have to let me talk to you.” 

Jester’s voice commanded. Such a terrible echo now, somewhere in her lovely throat. A god’s touch and here, Caleb, atheist. 

“We have little time now, Jester, is this important?”

“That is why I have to talk to you! Because there isn’t any time and tomorrow we might all be—” She cut off to draw a breath. “And you’re avoiding me, I know that you are, you aren’t as sneaky as you think you are, _Caleb_.”

“I am _preparing!_ ” 

It came out of him a shout. It was, she could not say his name like that, cloy and long, not after— The temple, the wood, the Traveler’s kiss, the spell, _you cannot change the name of fate, idiot Bren_ , Jester looking after Fjord with her heart a breaking thing, _the fey have your name, Bren, they have the shape of you_ , he is mad, he is mad. 

“They are coming and they will not stop, you do not know them—”

“Don’t you dare shout at me!” Jester shouted back. Her hand grabbed his arm. The cold burnt him. Her jaw stuck out; her eyes blazed. She said, “Caleb, now it is your turn to listen to me! Stupid runaway man, so smart and so stupid!” 

He laughed. He shouldn’t laugh. Ah, Jester. Ah, god, she too would die; the empire would bury them all; oh, Nott, oh, Beau, oh all his precious friends. Oh, god, Jester, sweet thing, sad thing, would that she had stayed in the house of her mother. Would you put her there, Caleb? Put her up in a little tower where she would live out all her days safely and lonely and never to taste the salt water or to run a fool through the jungle brush or to raise a god or to be a woman so brave and strong and loved, yes, loved. That you could love her.

He had no more anger in him. Caleb said tiredly, “What is it, Jester? What is it that you must tell me?”

Her hand withdrew but her fingers lingered, the tips making curlicues of the folded and dirtied lines of his shirt sleeve. She knitted her brows. She bit her lip. She said—

“There really isn’t any time left, is there.”

“No,” he said.

Her mouth trembled; then she steadied. Her fingers tightened in his sleeve.

“And what will happen tomorrow, if we do not stop it?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’m not a child, Caleb,” she said sharply. “We will die, won’t we? All of us.”

You cannot keep her, he thought.

“Yes,” he said.

Her eyes drifted lowly. Her lashes followed. She said very quietly, “I don’t want to die,” as she had said before once long ago, so very long ago, and he said—

He touched her hand on his sleeve. He said, “I don’t want you to die either.”

Jester sighed noisily through her teeth and said, “But what about you?”

“What about me?”

“I don’t want you to die,” she said, and she said, “Caleb,” as if this were the true name of him, as if she could pull out of the corpse of Bren another man, the same man, a better man. Or as if—He would not think it. He thought it anyway. As if it were Caleb who was Bren and they were the both of them enough. As if he were enough.  
Jester. He wanted to say her name like that. Jester Lavorre. I am in love with you. I have loved you for years now. That did not matter either. None of it did. He could love her if he liked but that did not mean he was owed her. 

He patted her hand where he held it. “It will be all right,” he said. “I am … not afraid. For the first time, I think, in many years.” Caleb tried a smile. 

“Caleb,” said Jester, “you are very smart. But sometimes I think maybe you are also very stupid.”

“You have already said this,” said Caleb. “If you’re trying to make me feel better about how we are all about to die terrible and excruciating deaths then you’re doing a very good job. I am feeling much better now that I think about how stupid I am.”

“That isn’t what I meant!” Her nose wrinkled anyway. Her cheeks dimpled. She tried so hard to look serious even as the skin at her eyes creased into a neat line on the outside, left and right. “What I’m trying to tell you is that—Caleb! Are you listening to me? I mean, are you _really_ listening to me?”

“I am listening, Jester,” he said.

“Okay. Good. You had better!” She bit her lip again and seemed to hesitate and then she said, in a rush, “You don’t have to die. You know? It’s okay to live, too. So you don’t have to do anything stupid and brave tomorrow, and I will take care of you.”

He said, “Jester,” and her name ached in his mouth. He said, “Oh, Jester,” and his traitorous hands came up to touch her beautiful, fat, blue face, and he was all of him a bruise, and he would die for her if it came to that; he would do it; he would die at her feet if it meant that she would breathe, this marvelous woman who came down out of her tower and walked out into the world and the world looked at her and sighed for it loved her.

“Don’t worry about me,” he said. He smiled. He did a better job of it this time. “You worry about yourself, okay? Tomorrow will… We will get through it. And we will win, maybe, if we are all of us together. And then it will be over and you can do whatever it is you want to do; you can travel the world and seduce handsome men and paint dicks on all the religious monument in Tal’Dorei. Maybe even Fjord will come around. Hm?”

But Jester only looked furious as he went on, her mouth pursing into an indignant knot, and at the end as he finished unsurely she burst out, “Fjord!” and he said, that uncertainty yawning widely in him, “Yes, Fjord—handsome half-orc fellow, you are in love with him?” grasping it seemed now to understand why she looked at Caleb as like she wanted to bash him over the head with her bandolier of healing potions.

“Fjord!” she said again. “You think! You—that I’m in love with _Fjord?_ ”

“You aren’t?” said Caleb. 

“I haven’t been in love with Fjord for two years!” she shouted. 

“You haven’t?” said Caleb.

Jester shoved him away and pointed a finger at him and said, “You!” and then said something truly hellacious in Infernal that made Caleb’s eardrums pop and the cavities under his eyes ring, and then Jester grabbed him again in her powerful, chilly hands and shouted even more loudly, “Caleb Widogast, you idiot, I am in love with _you!_ ” and then she kissed him so violently he bit his tongue and the inside of his left cheek.

He would push her away; he did not deserve— She was too— It wasn’t—

Caleb wound a hand in her hair and grabbed her around her lush and lovely waist and kissed her back with his mouth opening over hers, and she was opening her mouth too and grappling for him, her hands clutching at his arms, his hair, his, god, his _ass_ , her tongue was so cool and she tasted like, ah, something like mint. Now she was pulling his shirt out of his trousers; he was pressing her against the work table; her bandolier caught on her horns and she cursed and he laughed and smothered her dear face with open-mouthed kisses, lips and tongue at her nose, chasing that kiss she hid in the corners of her mouth, worshipping, worshipping as she stripped him of vest, of shirt buttons, and ran her hand covetous through the wiry red hair of his chest and soft stomach. Her nails pricked at him. His nipples, embarrassingly, tightened at the chill of her touch. Jester giggled and said, “ _Caaaay-leb_ ,” and he buried his face in her half-loosed dress, in that gaping neckline, into, god! her perfect, soft, fat breasts, streaked here and there with blue-silver stretch marks.

And maybe he had thought once or twice selfish bastard that he was of what it would be like to touch Jester, to count the freckles on her face, her long neck, her smooth shoulders. If Jester, kind and funny and sometimes cruel in her thoughtless way, should allow him to sink to his knees and put his head under her skirt and eat her cunt with his beard rough on her thighs and her ankles crossed on his back and his cock heavy and untouched in his trousers. 

What time remained to them?

She said, “Caleb, get off, get off, I need to—I can’t reach it, there’s so many buttons!” and he helped her with the buttons at the back of her dress, counting each gleaming turquoise button as he unhooked it, her breasts to his chest, his arms around her. Jester wound her arms about his neck, her elbows bent together, her hands out straight, and as he counted the last few buttons, down there at the small of her back, she was kissing his ear, his jaw, her lips brushing at the coarse hair of his beard. 

She had raised a god. Jester had done that. What was he to that? He was… He was Caleb, he supposed. 

“Katzchen,” he called her. “Katzenjunges. Liebchen—liebling—” 

Then another hundred or so endearments he’d never called anyone, every silly and soft thing he had ever heard his father or mother murmur to one another in the field or at home or in the midst of those village festivals that came every season. He hadn’t thought of those festivals in ages, the lanterns, the dancing, the food they all shared, the youths putting up thin birch trees in front of the houses of their sweethearts.

Jester, kissing him, her hands stroking his face, she said in return only his name, “Caleb, Caleb, Caleb,” his name an endearment the way she said it. She bit his chin with her too-sharp tiefling’s teeth then giggled at his sound of pain, more surprised than really hurt, and he got his hands on her ruffle-covered petticoated arse and hoisted her up on the table properly, and after that—

He’d never let himself think of this. Mouthing at her breasts, yes, he had allowed himself that fantasy; and he had wanted hungrily to kiss her feet and the knobs in her ankles and her dimpling knees and get his tongue into her as Jester were god and this was worship was fucking three fingers into her cunt and sucking at her clit until she came gasping and moaning and shivering around him, made rapturous by whatever measly offering he could give to her. 

Here, now, instead, on the eve of fuck all, Jester put her foot on his stomach and pushed him back so she could wiggle out of her skirts, and he yanked her petticoats down for her, and then she was wiggling her fingers and the buttons at the top of his trousers snapped off, the threads cut, so that Caleb was ripping his trousers to his knees and his long johns too, and Jester _laughed_ at his flannel long underwear, her laugh pealing like a bell filling up the room. 

“They’re warm!” he protested, but he was grinning at her laugh and the way she shook all over, her hands at her mouth, trying to push back her giggles and instead smushing her lips. 

She was laughing when he touched her with testing fingers and found her wet, and laughing as he leaned forward and himself still grinning kissed her, and laughing as he gripped his aching cock and guided it into her. 

He gasped at the heat of her, the slickness, how she giggled again and crossed her feet at the back of his knees. The bells, the bells. Frumpkin padded in the shadows. Death lurked. Jester tipped her face up to him and Caleb was…

The table rattled. At every stroke, as he made to withdraw, she rolled her hips up with him so that they were connected even so. Caleb buried his face in her bosom. Every inch of his skin felt as though it sparked: run through with lines of fire. Jester’s fingers scraped at his back; she ran them through his hair; she was saying to him such _things_ as she gasped and moaned as if it was pleasure he gave to her.

She was saying: “Caleb,” in her high and accented voice, pitched as near to a whisper as Jester could ever manage, “Caleb, I will keep you safe, Caleb,” and he bit at her breast and she squeaked and grabbed his head with a fist in his hair, to yank his head back and up to kiss the roughly bearded underside of his chin and there into the pale and exposed flesh of his throat continue:

“You are going to trust me, okay? And I’m going to trust you, and you don’t get to choose how I feel or what I—oh! Ohhhhh,” Jester sighed, his hand down between their bodies, his fingers slipping through her slick to touch at her clit, to tease at her cunt opened around him. 

Caleb panted. He stared at the dirt and wet basement moss caked into the crease between the wall and the ceiling, and then he closed his eyes so fiercely it hurt him to do it. He was talking. He didn’t know what he was saying. He’d dug fingers into her heavy thigh and he was stroking her face, tracing the holy lines the Traveler had burnt into her skin.

He told her in Zemnian, “I love you. I love you,” in the language his mother had taught him, the language his father taught him. He said, “Nothing will hurt you, not ever,” and that was not a thing he could promise to her or to anyone, but he felt it with a certainty that burned in his bones. 

“I can’t understand it when you talk in Zemnian.” Her face crinkled all over with a smile. “Wait, let me try something.” The hand at his head smoothed out and she pushed him gently to her so that her lips were at his ear. He shivered and stuttered his hips. It was—a filthy sound, the sound they made, and he was excited by its filthiness, by the way she surrounded him, his cock, his shoulders, his body, her lips at his ear as she said…

He did not know what she said. She said it in Infernal and a cold and frost-crackling vapor chilled his ear and nape so that all the hairs on his body stood on end. The bones in his face resonated. He clutched desperately at her. Jester fell back against the table. She smiled smug as a cat. She held her hands out to him. He fell on her, ravaging. 

“Jester,” he moaned. “Jester.”

She said, “Caleb.”

He said, “Jester,” and it spilled out of him then, all the wretched truths he’d buried in his belly, all the selfish things he had intended to carry alone into death. Love, yes, and hunger, and worship, gods damn him, this blasphemy; and the greed to eat away her tears and to bask in her anger and to tuck the hair behind her horns and put a May flower in her hair and see her smile. He did not want to put her in a tower, to never hurt. He wanted to witness Jester: to see her take the world and make it hers as—as she had made him hers.

Her breath hitched. She was crying, snow drops on her cheeks. Jester said, “I’m yours, too,” and she shuddered under his hands and around his cock and her mouth fell open and she sighed out his name and came clenching about him. He’d have bruises tomorrow, going to war, bruises where she’d clutched fists around his shoulders. 

It was thinking of this, and how she kissed him once more ferociously, her teeth bared against his lips, that cut Caleb’s legs out for him; and he spilled his come into her as he said her name over and over, _Jester, Jester_ , like a poor farmer’s prayer, _death will come another day_ ; and they held each other with their tools of war scattered about them there in that little underground stone room, kissing hungrily as the end came creeping at their heels with its own empty gut to fill.


End file.
